Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainable Growth in Agriculture in India

Abstract

Purpose: The intervention by corporate is said to have huge impact on socio-economic environment. The study aims to find out spending patterns of CSR corpus by corporate on agriculture sector as well as possible solution for farm sector infrastructure bottlenecks in agriculture sector through CSR intervention.
Approach: This study uses publicly available CSR expenditure data on agriculture by 20 Indian corporate.
Findings: Study finds that the CSR spending in agriculture is far less in comparison to many sectors such as education, healthcare, art and culture etc. Also a few large firms were voluntarily spending a part of their earnings on CSR initiatives even before the provisions relating to CSR were introduced in Companies Act 2013. There is need to put a mechanism to avoid overlap of different schemes by the governments as well as CSR projects for the benefit to the larger section of society. The provision of mandatory CSR expenditure on agriculture sector may be helpful to bring farm sector out of distress. Also by pooling the CSR resources can help to build and operate large projects to address to problem of bottlenecks like cold storage and logistic infrastructure in agriculture. Tax benefits to donations to entities involved into operating such agriculture projects will not only help to build such project but increase economic activities in rural economy.
O
riginality: The provision of mandatory CSR expenditure on agriculture sector may be helpful to bring farm sector out of distress. Also by pooling the CSR resources can help to build and operate large projects to address to problem of bottlenecks like cold storage and logistic infrastructure in agriculture. Tax benefits to donations to entities involved into operating such agriculture projects will not only help to build such project but increase economic activities in rural economy.